Death by [Sound Effect]: A Halloween Sound Design Challenge

A collaborative post with introduction by

To celebrate Halloween in gruesome style we came up with a unique challenge for our editors: Death by Sound Effect! To kick off the creativity, we asked the team to come up with bone-chilling, funny bone-tickling and gut-wrenching ways to die, and threw all of their ideas into a hat. Each participating editor was randomly assigned a form of savage expiration, and encouraged to be creative in their approach to a sound effect representative of that event.

Jessey Drake - Death by Guillotine

A "Death By Guillotine" is pretty straight forward. However, since it is Halloween and I love designing and cutting gore, I made this one considerably gruesome. I also wanted to make sure we heard the mechanisms of the guillotine. The actual weapon is medieval in design so I wanted to hear some of the gears and the rope that when released, chop off the head of its victim. I even threw in a head roll for a little flare at the end. And all of this sounds really sadistic but the end result came out pretty horrifying.

John Lopez - Death by Rapid Mutation

I decided to go with a mutation gone terribly wrong and construct something really gory and gritty. I started with a few key elements, like leather stretches and branch snaps to simulate the skin stretching out and bones snapping, but added some sweeteners to really get the point across. A water bottle being crushed made a perfect addition to the snapping scratches. I also added some fruit and vegetable squishes as a gore sound effect wouldn’t be complete without one!

Kirsten Carey - Death by Giant Robot Stomp

A couple weeks ago, I was asked to record some "metal wronks" for the Boom Box library. When you research how to create metal wronks, you pretty quickly find out that dry ice on scrap metal can yield roars that make Godzilla proud. So I was pretty pleased when I drew "Death By Giant Robot Stomp," because I knew I'd get to use some of those dry ice recordings - that's precisely where all the low creaks and moans I used are from. The foot impacts are the combination of an LFE hit and some incredibly incidental hits of the dry ice against a huge metal cylinder while I trying to find "sweet spots" for the groans.

Tess Fournier - Death by Disintegration

I’m not sure if what I designed is “Death By Disintegration” or just a way of disposing of a body after death has occurred, but for this I imagined a body disintegrating in a vat of acid (as I’ve seem before in horror films). It starts with a splash and an “acid sizzle” to indicate the body being dropped in and then what follows is a build of sizzles, bubbles, gore movement, cabbage tearing (for that nice flesh and bone breaking-down sound). It ends with a crescendo of bubbles and a reversed “acid splash” to indicate a total submerge of the body, and a final light sizzle fade out.

What are you favorite sounds representing scares, horror and gruesome demise? Let us know in the comments!